Corporeal Mobilities in Action Sport Cultures: Tourists, Professionals and Seasonal Migrants

Abstract

Action sport participants are avid travellers. Travelling regionally and internationally in pursuit of uncrowded waves (surfers), fresh snow (skiers and snowboarders), new routes (climbers) and trails (mountain bikers), or consistent wind and warm water (kite-surfers and windsurfers), is considered an integral part of many action sport cultures. This is particularly the case for those action sports in which the natural environment — oceans, beaches, mountains, and rivers — is central to participation.1 The release of Bruce Brown’s film The Endless Summer in 1964 was pivotal in creating the transnational imaginary among action sport enthusiasts. According to some sources, Brown was encouraged by a travel agent friend to create a film that captured the essence of the ‘surfari’ experience. The film follows two young American surfers, Mike Hynson and Robert August, on their journeys to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Tahiti and Hawaii, with various other locations along the way. Rather unexpectedly, the amateurish film grossed US$20 million and quickly became a cult classic. The surfing historian Drew Kampion identified the ‘search for the perfect wave’ as epitomized in this film as a symbol that ‘ignited the explosion of surf travel that would shape the sport for the rest of the millennium’ (p. 2). Adopting a more critical analysis of the impact of this film, surf journalist Steve Barilotti observed Hynson and August adopting a friendly but condescending tone with local communities in Africa and South Africa, thus ‘set[ting] the paradigm early of surfers as goofball neo-colonialists’ (Barilotti, 2002, p. 36; also see Ponting, 2007).